Image Processing and WorkflowRAW, DNG , TIFF and JPG. From Capture to Ready for Publish/Display. All software and techniques used within an image workflow, (except extensive retouching and repair or DAM).

I am delighted to post for Steven Teitelbaum several pictures of his recent shoot in New York.

We start today with Central Park. This one one of New York's most romantic places to visit. In the fall, the tall New York Skyline is reflected between autumn leaves floating in the water. Paths are lined with yellows and gold.

I have selected a few that caught my eye and Steven kindly gave OPF limited use consent for you to process his RAW files to the best of your ability and post the results here. You can use any RAW processor. We hope to learn from you something of the reserve and robustness of these files.

These compressed JPG images shown here ARE NOT FOR DOWLOAD! The files are obtainable by sending me a PM with you name and your level of experience and RAW processor and I will send them to you. If this goes well, many more files will be made available.

You can optimize them any way you like in color or B&W. You can, if you wish add film grain, if that what you like to do. All images must be posted only here and should have &#169; Steven Teitelbaum 2006 on one edge. Your Title and concepts should be succinctly given so we can correlate variants with intents!

Thank Steven for being so generous. We hope for some very interesting images as a result!

I wanted these colors to pop out, so I used an RGB ZoneMapper to boos the contrast in the foliage tonal range, which will also increase the color saturarion (reds and yellows!). This is the same trick photographers used to play with slide film: underexpose the shot increases saturation...

I also used the ToneMapper on the skyscrapers image, to have a more dramatic sky and open up the shadows.

But I wanted even more pop, so I used a trick that I recently learned from one of our own forums contributor and I adedd a Sharpen layer with large radius and with Soft Light blending mode, looks beautiful to me.

The colors, saturated as they are, add an extraordinary rich style and seem to me to provide a more personal encapsualting presence than the Adobe RAW "as is" images I posted. Mine by comparison look somewhat more open and a larger space!

The richness of colors is more better realized in your first image. The clouds have more 3 dimensionality from the way LightZone has handled the hues and tones in the clouds and brought out the subtle beauty.

I might have an issue perhaps with the skin tone of the people in the middle image, but it is likely that you din't deal with this separately.

Otherwise this is a new experience for me and I thank you!

Have you also considered a B&W, toned or untoned? That would be a special place where LZ should be king!

Kind wishes and appreciation,

Asher

BTW, you should provide titles, since htis is your intepretation! This way we might understand how the paths of related creativity works!

The images are easy to treat. (As if I was a great expert and master of the thing... :)
The images on the left are JPG from the original files un-treated. I use PSC, the RAW converter from PS CS2.
All I have done:
1. Change to LAB
2. Apply curves and make adjustments
3. Unsharp Mask in Lighness channel
4. Crop
5. Stroke
6. Canvas
7. Copyright
8. Save As JPG 12

On the 1.st photo I made 2 shots: one for the background and another for the reflection,
They were then melted after a mask.

On the 2.ed photo I corrected the yellow overcast.

On the 3.ed photo I cloned the bench

In all of them I have cropped with my own size 30*20
They are in my site here

__________________
All the best to you !
António Correia
+351 969 067 950 / +(415) 625 3427 ImagesBeauty is in the eyes of the beholder

The images are easy to treat. (As if I was a great expert and master of the thing... :)
The images on the left are JPG from the original files un-treated. I use PSC, the RAW converter from PS CS2.
All I have done:
1. Change to LAB
2. Apply curves and make adjustments
3. Unsharp Mask in Lighness channel
4. Crop
5. Stroke
6. Canvas
7. Copyright
8. Save As JPG 12

On the 1.st photo I made 2 shots: one for the background and another for the reflection,
They were then melted after a mask.

On the 2.ed photo I corrected the yellow overcast.

On the 3.ed photo I cloned the bench

In all of them I have cropped with my own size 30*20
They are in my site here

__________________
All the best to you !
António Correia
+351 969 067 950 / +(415) 625 3427 ImagesBeauty is in the eyes of the beholder

Here's a couple "all in C1" versions. Taken into PS only to resize, add copyright and border. Composition was good so I didn't crop. These are fairly straightforward so I won't title. Skipped the third because it doesn't strike me. The first has a double-hump histo screaming for dual or even triples so I'll do that later. Had a hard time keeping the clouds while bringing out the foreground and sacrificed contrast on the buildings to do this. AWB seems to be weakness, cooled both images slightly. Tonality (DR) is great, lots to work with.

- DL

__________________
Don Lashierwww.lashier.com
- old enough to know better - but I do it anyway

Thanks for mentioning the tonality / DR of the M8 files. I've been "multiple exposing" files here till the cows come home, and it really is exceptionally good, even compared with my 1ds2 standard :)

You're right--that first shot screams for at least three C1 develops. I don't know if you've tried LightZone, but I like its ability to work independently with selections; I'm afraid my prowess with it though renders the results a little artificial looking still (not so good feathering the selections, and I usually want to avoid a lot of mid-tone colour shifts when compositing... and I don't know how to do that with LightZone yet).

I cooled this to 5000 and the leaves came back to realistic. used "film extra shadow" and generic M8 profile (of 3.7.6) since the exposure looked good. Lowered exposure a bit, increased cc and cs (whatever they mean) by my usual amount, turned color noise reduction off (default is halfway across the slider!). That's all. It looks more real to me now.

scott

edit: the file may change to meet specifications (800 px high instead of wide, copyright overwritten), but not tonight. This will make several following comments a little obscure, but they remain useful.

Nice version, but you forgot the copyright. Also, I don't know about others, but I find it a lot easier to compare if all are uniform size (ala original post, 800px max).

- DL

I've never learned to do that. Does it require a trip to Photoshop? I just set C1's output specification to get 800 px width. Anyway, short description of copyright overlay would be appreciated and useful in the future. I can fix this one by replacing the file once it is labelled.

My version looked a little wetter and colder than the original, but that was probably what the day was like.

Ok, here's my triple conversion effort. Three conversions done in C1 - sky/buildings/everything-else. Separating the sky was easy but masking some of the trees was not, and I'm not sure worth the effort. If this were going to be printed any size, additional mask cleanup would need to be done.

- DL

__________________
Don Lashierwww.lashier.com
- old enough to know better - but I do it anyway

Before proceeding I want to thank Steven Teitelbaum for offering us the opportunity to get a good look at some M8 raw files and to process them for ourselves. I found the files to be a very high quality, the equivalent of my Canon 5D and 1-body files. Each image was quite sharp, owing certainly to the quality of Leica M lenses. I applied no sharpening to any of the images below. The only sharpening applied, indirectly, was when downsizing them and applying a bicubic sharpening algorithm.

General Remarks: Please note that my remarks are by no means intended as criticisms of Steven's work. I do not know his intentions for any of the images and simply treat them, and narrate the processing, as if I had captured them.

Autumn foliage scenes can be as seductive to one's lens as Homer's sirens. They seductively attract the lens with each turn of the head. It isn't until you find yourself poring through the images that you discover that many of your images are often visually tedious. When you consider why you pressed the button you may discover that you were trying to capture more than a camera can capture. The sounds and scents of the scene. The crisp breeze. It's like returning from Maui with only a souvenir t-shirt. So as I repeat such photography I look for opportunities to make the foliage an interesting background for a more specific subject.

The general theme of such scenes in urban parks, particularly New York's Central Park, is the environment's relationship to people. People, after all, are the only reason for these parks to exist. So it was with this principle in mind that I began work on Steven's images. With regard to general tonality adjustments my goal was, and always is, to make such adjustments sparingly. It's very easy to go far overboard with such scenes, slipping out of photography and into artistic fantasy. I avoid that. Since it was a dreary, overcast day with flat lighting I primarily used slight saturation, color temperature, exposure, and black level adjustments to enhance the actual scenes rather than to create scenes that didn't exist. I made most such adjustments in Adobe's Lightroom Beta 4.1 and a very few adjustments, as noted below, in Photoshop.

This first image created the biggest compositional challenge. The original image established a nearly perfect "H" with the buildings forming the uprights and the edge of the park forming the horizon. I felt that a choice had to be made with regard to the image's subject. I chose to crop the bright sky and tops of the towers. This encouraged the eye to dwell on the tranquility of the pond, and the general luminance of its surroundings, with its reflections clearly revealing the urbanities cropped from above. In cropping, however, I left enough of the buildings to reveal that this scene could be no place other than New York's Central Park. No other city has so many stepped-back building elevations (due to some unique building codes).

This next image was, to my eye, an example of those sirens calling the lens. I'm sure that the trees were beautiful. But the subjects of the scene are the people enjoying a leisurely moment in their midst. The trees' presence is everywhere in the scene, so it was unnecessary to show their trunks and branches. You know they're there and what their coloration is. Cropping also created a more interesting composition, with the pavement of the path leading the eye from the girl in the foreground to the people on the next bench, to the man walking towards the camera. I added a very subtle vignetting to help further contain the eye.

I wasn't planning to work on this fountain but it kept calling my name. By cropping I tried to establish the fountain's bowl as the primary subject and also a relationship between it and the nearby bench -- suggesting a spot of peaceful rest and contemplation. I used subtle dodge and burn to bring out the patina of the wonderful old bronze bowl and also to make it seem more like an organic extension of the leaf litter. Again I added a slight vignette, this time to give a heightened sense of specialness to the fountain.

Thanks again, Steven, for use of your files in this exercise. I hope my interpretations have not offended you, but rather provided you with some entertainment. Enjoy that M8!

I enjoyed your description of how your intentions are framed by your perception of human presence. Your crops to my mind stengthen the images.

Stephen, BTW has been without internet until he was in the airport and got someone to let him get on line. He wrote me that he is "amazed" and very appreciative for all the labor od love that is still going into his work.

How could people all over the world share their creative viewpoints in anything but this new digital media. Somehow, even scanned film I don't think would allow such license!

While I like Ken's third crop (fountain) (and perhaps it solves comp issues that led me to reject the image in the first place), I experimented with cropping on the other two and don't feel the initial shots can really be improved upon other than perhaps some drastic crops on the lake/building shot: eg, a tall skinny one, or a rather severe horizontal crop highlighting the far shore activity, but the latter is really a different shot best done with a different lens.

- DL

__________________
Don Lashierwww.lashier.com
- old enough to know better - but I do it anyway